


All Glass Houses

by kay_cricketed



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, M/M, Occult Shenanigans, Traumatic Brain Injury, but is still hanging around and being a main character anyway, depression and grief, featuring the avengers team as paranormal investigators who would like to adopt steve, graphic drowning, major character death refers to bucky, military death, paranormal horror, steve gaslighting himself slightly by doubting his own perception, unnerving imagery, who is dead before this story even starts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 21:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18106826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: After Steve's medical discharge, he brings a recovering head injury and Bucky Barnes home to Brooklyn to lay down some roots in a historic brownstone apartment.  To Steve, it's fitting.  They're not just remodeling a home; they're building something new and unspoken, a place where they can put a name to what they've grown into.Those intentions all come to a grinding halt when Bucky, wrapping up his final tour, comes home in a box.  And start up again when Steve begins to see signs that Bucky isn't asgoneas he'd thought.Unfortunately, Bucky isn't the only secret the brownstone has hidden in its rooms, and Steve's well-intentioned efforts to help him open doors that were meant to stay shut.





	1. the gloaming

**Author's Note:**

> Wheeew, the finish line is near! I would like to massively thank my amazing artist calendulae, who was so patient and encouraging throughout this. She is so talented and fantastic, and you should go give her so much love on either [Twitter](https://twitter.com/calendulaes) or [Tumblr](https://calendulae.tumblr.com/). I want to have all of her embroidery ever.
> 
> A minor note regarding this story: after much deliberation, I chose to "conjure" up some occult rituals rather than use ones I'd researched or read about. I don't need any of y'all going out there and pulling a Steve Rogers. I don't trust you a lick. Street smarts.
> 
> More seriously, the depictions of grief in this fic can get intense. Loss is difficult and varies for all of us, and it does deal specifically with death in the line of service to the best of my current ability. Please be aware going in that if that's not something you're comfortable with, this may not be the fic for you.

**i.**

 

He woke up because he heard someone shut the front door.

Even as Steve lifted his head from the pillow, listening to the dark beyond, he knew it was all in his head. It wasn’t the first time Steve had heard the sound when he was alone in the apartment. Sometimes when Bucky couldn’t sleep—and he never slept easily, not since his first tour—he’d wrench on his jacket and go out. To the corner store, maybe, or the Eight Ball, a dated bar just shy of two city blocks west where nothing on tap had changed since the nineties. _Lights and booze to burn up the worms_ , he said once. No matter how softly or carefully he pulled the door shut on his way in and out, it always registered on the edge of Steve’s consciousness.

After half a year of living together, it was as familiar as the sound of the telephone or the high-speed rattle of the F Line on its tracks overhead. He would hear the door close on the periphery whether it happened or not. A trick of the mind—one of the few he found comforting.

But Bucky wasn’t home. Bucky wasn’t even in Brooklyn right now. He was burning his worms in the acrid sun half a world away, digging up new reasons to stay awake.

Steve got up to get a glass of water. Nearly four years of active service and he’d never had much trouble sleeping. Two months without Bucky across the hall from his bedroom and Steve spent an awful lot of time getting up to get some water.

He turned on some lights to keep him company and as a precaution against stepping on the mess he’d made earlier—yesterday, by this hour—trying to tighten the hinges on the cupboards. Half of the cupboard doors were still propped up against the kitchen counter in neat rows like tombstones. He’d promised Bucky to have the kitchen done by the time he was back. It was slow going. Steve had some tough days, then tougher nights. It wasn’t as fun working on renovations alone; it became a chore.

The water was tepid at best. Steve drank it all, anyway.

He put the glass on the counter. The sink was already full of them: empty glasses of varying sizes, stamped with the impression of his mouth. For a while, he just stared down at their concentric circles, resting his weight on the rim of the sink.

Someone knocked at the door.

(Maybe this was the moment he knew. Maybe even as he made his way to the living room like he was in some dream, slow on his feet, feeling that _feeling_ well up inside of having already done something once before, maybe then he’d seen what was coming. Maybe it was earlier yet, when he dreamt he heard Bucky shut the door on his way out.)

Rebecca, Bucky’s sister, was outside on the mat. She was wearing a threadbare shirt and sweatpants under her coat, and the skin around her eyes was red and raw. “Steve,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

He knew then, anyway. He sure knew then.

“I didn’t want you to tell you over the phone,” she said.

 

**ii.**

 

The morning of the funeral came and went, unearthing shadows against Steve’s bedroom wall that he hadn’t known could form. He’d always been an early riser. But there was no longer any clear definition between waking and sleep—the hours passed, the sun bled out—and caught in that quiet, wholly undemanding loop, Steve remained in bed. He framed the edge of the mattress with his body and watched the clock on his bedside table waste its time. He watched the faintly rattling copper pipes lining the baseboards. He watched the light play on plaster.

His mind was empty of thoughts, but he had a passing notion, barely cut into words, of staying in this space. A daydream, maybe. If the world cycled over him long enough, the water damage in the corner might spread and consume the ceiling, and black moss would blossom like a bruise behind his dresser and creep up the window frames, and Steve would still be concentrating on the mechanisms of breathing: the inhale, the exhale, the noise of it, the wet fault lines. Maybe for a moment, he would close his eyes. Maybe there was room for Bucky in that space, in that fraction of time.

He was afraid to listen for him.

The room was darkening when Steve heard someone jimmy the lock on the front door. It shook once, twice—the give of the bolt slid into his brain.

He looked at the clock and felt the heaviness settle on him again. Footsteps on the creaky wood flooring—measured, not like Bucky’s loping gait—announced Sam’s journey through the entire apartment. The noise used to bother Bucky, the way it could sound off in strange places.

_It’s historic_ , Steve had argued when they signed for the mortgage. _A genuine piece of New York history. Guys our size’ll make a racket when we walk no matter where we go, Buck._

_It’s old as balls,_ , said Bucky. _There’s an actual hole in the wall, you saw that, right? Whole thing’s a Loony Tunes accident waiting to happen. If you ever wanted to know how the anvil feels, this is the place you wanna be._

_Name one other place in our price range that’s even half this size._

Bucky rolled his eyes, but he signed the paperwork with the same crooked, blocky scratch that Steve used; they’d learned their letters together. Learned most things together. _You’re the lucky guy who gets to rip down all this wallpaper,_ he said. Two weeks later, he was helping Steve replace the backsplash in the kitchen, a white stripe of mastic under his chin.

“Steve?” Sam asked from the doorway. 

Steve didn’t have anything to say. So he didn’t say anything.

( _How is it we’re using a level and everything,_ Bucky said, _but the tiles are still crooked?_ He was more meticulous about it than Steve was. He had pride of ownership.)

Sam sat on the other side of the bed, his weight sinking the mattress. He’d come in his dress uniform. “I told Rebecca to give you some time,” he said. “She’s worried about you, but she’s got plenty of things on her mind, too. You’ve got a grace period before she comes knocking.”

“Thanks,” said Steve, the word sticking.

“I know how it goes, man.”

Shame kindled in him briefly, but Steve knew there hadn’t been any judgment meant. Sam did know. He’d had someone once, too, and then didn’t have them anymore. Steve had only met Riley the once. He remembered his hand, when he shook Steve’s, was dry and craggy, wear cut deep into the skin. 

So they didn’t talk—they didn’t have to. Sam stretched out across his half of the mattress, put his iPod on the nightstand, and played _Trouble Man_ on shuffle. After a few songs, Steve rubbed the wet grit out of his eyes and turned over in bed; it was good to feel his thoughts derail and follow the tracks of something else instead. 

Sam’s toes hitched in time to the music. He didn’t look at Steve, but once the last of the light was gone, he said, “You want me to stay the night?”

“You don’t have do that.”

“No. But do you want me to?”

There was a notable difference between empty spaces waiting to be reclaimed and empty spaces left to atrophy. It had only taken a matter of hours after Rebecca informed him for Steve to shut up Bucky’s room so he wouldn’t have to see his shirts lining the closet, the dresser cluttered with a hodgepodge of tokens—hair products, a bowl of movie ticket stubs, his grandfather’s collection of heavy silver rings that Bucky kept but never wore—or the last of the unpacked moving boxes, the flaps hanging open in silent promise. Sooner than Steve could stand, the room would have to be cleared. He could use it as a guest room then. For times like this, when Sam stayed over.

Steve always planned on that happening. Only, he thought it’d happen after he—if it went well, and they’d decided to share a—

“You’re killing me here,” Sam said, sounding pained. He hooked an arm under Steve’s and pulled him into his arms, the heat of another body almost a shock. “I wish you were an ugly crier,” he said, raking fingers through Steve’s bedhead. “Go on. Go on, man, let’s have it.” 

 

**iii.**

 

They were eight when they met.

Steve was a matchstick boy: thin, sickly, and combustible. He’d never left the borough. He kept his chin and his fists high, and the other kids found him to be an alien sort of creature, too prickly and too sweet at any given minute to predict. It wasn’t that Steve meant to be difficult. He simply _was_.

And Bucky wasn’t. Bucky knew what to _say_ ; he was funny, well-liked, affable. He was boyish in the best ways. Something about the charm his father treated his mother with had left a mark on him, and so he spoke in compliments, was free with his pocket money, and thought about everything twice over before he made a decision.

They went to the same elementary school. The first two times they spoke, it was to disagree over how to spell nougat— _You’re probably right,_ Bucky said, and Steve stared at him like he’d cussed—and when Steve offered, stiltedly, to give up the reading corner bean bag chair at Bucky’s arrival. The third time, Steve had a skinned elbow and a bloody nose, of which he was pretty proud, and Bucky carried his backpack and helped him wobble home and said, _You’re a few cents short of a nickel, huh?_

Steve liked that. He liked it more than the crooked, pleasant smile and bright eyes, and for sure more than the other nice stuff Bucky said to everybody else.

After that, they were inseparable. Steve spent entire days sharing comic books with Bucky as they crowded on his bottom bunk, avoiding his haggle of sisters. They learned how to ride bicycles and how to actually spell nougat, and they partnered up in gym and then for science labs, and there were no secrets between them, not even the secrets that hurt their throats to utter, like how Steve’s mother was the kind of sick that wasn’t going to get better and how Bucky sometimes felt like nothing he did was ever good enough. And maybe Steve wasn’t a great influence—while Bucky never started any fights, he learned soon enough how to finish ‘em—but Bucky’s mom remarked, more than once, _It’d take a crow bar to pry those boys apart._

They were twelve when Steve finally got his growth spurt and began to ease into those big mitts of his. Probably, it would’ve been a lot less traumatic if Steve hadn’t smashed his way through the wall of puberty, but that wasn’t his fault. 

_Finally,_ said Bucky. _Gettin’ real tired of being your muscle, Stevie._

What a liar. He was worse than ever about butting in and puffing up like a blowfish whenever someone breathed wrong in Steve’s direction. But it was kind of—a relief.

They were eighteen when they enlisted.

When Steve enlisted. 

He thought Bucky might get angry at him, but then he’d brood on it a while and get over it. Steve was ready for a fight. He had a mental list of arguments why it made sense: his mom couldn’t afford to send him to college and his only passion, aside from busting up assholes who hadn’t learned their manners, was art, which never paid much of a livelihood; the military opened up a world of possibilities for him that would otherwise be a struggle to crack open; and if he were more honest, he knew there were muddied and hard things out there in the world, and Steve couldn’t rest quiet with himself until he’d done his best to ease them. He wasn’t sure how else to do it except to enlist.

It was worse than he thought it’d be, though. Because Bucky _did_ get angry—silent angry, flint-eyed angry—but instead of brooding, he got himself signed up, too.

_Don’t_ , he snapped when Steve tried, horrified, to persuade him to skip his appointment for aptitude testing. _You wouldn’t listen to me, so you don’t get to tell me what to do now. I don’t want to go to college unless you’re there, and I don’t know what I’d do even if you were. I’d be just as good at this as I would be working with Dad, and if you think I’m gonna hang around here while people try their best to kill you, well—well then, you don’t know me at all, Steve. And I thought about it, too, and I think we could be pretty good at this together. We’d be rotten at it on our own—I’d get caught up in my head, and you’ll only last as long as it takes for somebody to give you an order you don’t like—but together, we’d be all right. You should’ve told me earlier. You should know I would’ve had your back._

Yeah, Steve knew that. That was why he hadn’t told him.

Probably Bucky saw that in his face, though, because he shoved him hard. Twice, he shoved him, then yanked him back in for a hug. _Fuck that_ , he said roughly. He didn’t let Steve go for a long time. 

And it turned out that there were muddied and hard things in the world, but Steve Rogers was no match for any of them. He did some good, and he did plenty more sort-of good. If he was alive, it was because Bucky stubbornly kept pace and did everything in his power to stay in Steve’s orbit. It was because sometimes guns were finicky in arid, sandy landscapes, and because Bucky reminded him more often than not that sometimes there were no good answers to a problem. 

They were brothers in arms; they shared one coffee cup between them. They traded nightmares and protein over breakfast. By the second tour, they started talking about _after_ as a placeholder for this strange alter-reality they’d found: a place to call their own, where they’d get donuts in the morning, how big Rebecca’s kid was going to be, how spoiled.

Their contract was only four years. Steve made it near that. Then: a device detonated in the street. Then: it was close enough that Steve’s ear drums blew out and he was blown back into the ruins of a barrel vault. It hurt in a way he hadn’t known anything could hurt before. He blacked out, woke up, slapped his own face. He tried to get up but couldn’t. Desperate, he ripped off his helmet and gasped, but the air was thick with grime, tasted like it was on fire all the way down. He pressed a fist to his mouth and tried not to vomit.

He couldn’t hear Bucky, but he did, in a way. The impression of his voice, maybe, beyond the high-pitched drone. Then his touch—the way he cupped the side of Steve’s head a sentence all on its own—and the pain, fissure-like, surging back to the forefront. Steve retched and lifted his hand from his mouth and saw the way blood filled it in a perfect cup.

He felt like he was melting in Bucky’s arms: boneless, a composite of frequencies gone wrong, the tallow lit and left. His eyes got so heavy, he just closed them.

With just over half a year left on his contract and a traumatic head injury, the medical discharge under honorable conditions was the best he could’ve hoped for. They told him, after the fact, that it took a literal hole in his head to relieve the pressure on his brain. They told him there may be lasting damage. They told him only time would tell.

Not everything needed more time than he’d already given it, though. When the heavily medicated fog lifted and Steve opened his eyes to the sight of Bucky asleep all akimbo at his bedside, that’s when he knew. Probably he should’ve known sooner, but Steve had always been a few cents short of a nickel. Bucky was unshaven and off-color, and he’d followed Steve into an actual war he wanted no part of. He snorted when Steve said something that wasn’t funny. He bitched at Steve for every decision he ever made. 

When Steve imagined a life—any life—he couldn’t imagine Bucky not being the biggest part of it. He wanted to clasp Bucky’s wrist and count his pulse, and he wanted to tell him what he was feeling. It overtook him as tides break on the shore: completely, so completely.

 

**iv.**

 

Steve got up and around the day after the funeral, but he did it out of sheer necessity: his water bill hadn’t been paid, the trash was starting to smell, and his body hurt from a day of immobility. The low-grade headache that had doggedly followed his heels since the head injury made a comeback. He took four ibuprofen and went about the business of living.

He remembered this from when his mom had passed, too. How the world moved on ahead and made something momentous seem like a soft speed bump. Nothing cared to pause in the wake of Bucky being gone; even his stomach wanted to eat, and his heart carded its blood. He knew he’d get used to not having Bucky around even as his grief pulsed in unexpected, intermittent moments, catching him off guard. It was a question of when, not if. 

Sam, dressed down to his trousers and an undershirt, manned the stove. There wasn’t much in the fridge aside from eggs and ketchup, but he was a big believer in starting the day with breakfast. Him and Bucky were likeminded in that way. “Might be too early to ask,” he said, “but what do you plan to do about this place?”

“Do about what?” Steve asked.

“Let me rephrase that. Can you _afford_ the mortgage payment by yourself?”

Steve looked at the backsplash above the counter. It had remained crooked, like teeth. He rubbed the thin knots of his sweater cuff between his finger and thumb. Could he? Not really—but he’d been building something here. It didn’t seem right to abandon it.

“Depends on whether Buck left me his priceless baseball card collection,” he said. The words were wooden in his mouth. But Bucky would’ve snorted at them.

“He told me _you_ had a collection.”

“He’s a liar.”

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” Sam said, abandoning his post at the stove to check the refrigerator again. The artificial lights put truth to how tired he was. “You seriously don’t have any cheese? Who doesn’t have cheese?”

Steve watched him, a weary sort of tenderness rooting deep. He didn’t have many people left to love—it had it go somewhere. “I guess I need to go grocery shopping.” 

“I’m using up what’s left of the salsa.”

“Okay.”

“He always said you were a lot of work,” Sam told him. He got a plate and set some scrambled eggs in front of Steve. They were hot and muddied red from the salsa. Steve ate, pushing himself to finish.

Some things just had to be done. He got out a notepad afterwards to make a shopping list, and spent more time than he anticipated separating out the items he’d only ever gotten for Bucky, anyway. That reminded him that he should throw out the half-eaten thin mints in the freezer; no one would be finishing them.

 

**v.**

 

He woke up twice that night to the front door closing.

It wasn’t comforting anymore. Steve turned over and buried his face in the pillow, straining to listen despite himself. He couldn’t hear anything over the hiss and clank of the radiator. His bedroom was cold but he didn’t feel like moving to adjust the valve or, worse, the boiler that squatted in a closet in their—his—kitchen. The radiator was a temperamental cast-iron giant, a relic from the past that Steve loved until he’d learned how unreliable it was.

The third time, he was still awake so he got up to unlock and re-lock the front door. Then he went to get a glass of water. He could see his breath by the moonlight in the kitchen.

 

**vi.**

 

“What’s your number?” Sam asked him.

Steve had a scale of numbers these days. He routinely sabotaged the entire point of having it by picking something arbitrarily to piss Bucky off. _Negative eight_ , he’d say. _Detroit. The letter S._

_S for smartass_ , Bucky said. _Take a goddamn pain pill, you mook._

“I don’t know, Sam,” he said. “Four? Just a headache.”

“Moody?”

“I was moody _before_ I busted my skull,” Steve said, because Bucky had said it often enough that it came automatic to his tongue.

Sam looked on him a while, his coat bundled under his arm and dark eyes searching. He was wearing charcoal slacks and a maroon dress shirt—heading to the VA then—and he’d never been the friend who showed up unannounced, but he hadn’t called ahead this time. When he had come inside, he scanned the apartment like he was looking for a specific list, like it was a treasure hunt: lack of fire, disarray, neglect, check check _check_. “You had any house calls? Rebecca stop by?”

“Not yet. Next week.”

“Okay. Okay.” Sam ran a hand over his nose and mouth.

“Sam.” He softened. “I’m okay. At least, I’m going to _be_ okay. I could use a little time to get there, all right?”

“He would’ve wanted me to make sure,” said Sam.

The push up from his belly was hard and blocky; it had no hope of breaching his throat. Steve swallowed it down and down and down. His vision blurred, but only just, and he hid it by bending down and picking up some of the paint cans on the floor. He moved them two feet to the left.

“Gonna get some work done?” Sam asked, after a moment.

“Yeah. Thinking—maybe the hall.”

“I wasn’t gonna say anything,” Sam said, “but it’s ugly, man.” He paused, made a face, and shook out his coat before shrugging it on. “Hey, does this charming rathole have _heat_ or are you trying to numb your emotions literally as well as figuratively?”

“I’m a very literal person,” Steve said, even though he was surprised. The heat of the steam pipes had risen from beneath the floorboards by the morning and he wasn’t cold at all.

 

**vii.**

 

Steve never said—although Bucky had to have known—but he loved this stupid, rundown top-floor apartment in its historic brownstone not far from the stacks he and Bucky had grown up in. He loved it on first sight: the juddering elevator and winding staircases to their floor, the brass plaque on the door, the big open living space and the way only one wall had windows but made up for it by having too many. The living room had one exit aside from the door, and that was the hallway that spanned its side and connected up the rest of the rooms: the narrow kitchen, the bathroom without any ventilation, and at the end, directly across from each other, Steve and Bucky’s bedrooms holding each other accountable. There _had_ been a hole in the wall—a few, they realized later—that exposed a time capsule of poorly executed fix-its. The windows were single-paned and warping. The water never trickled out of a faucet, but chugged, clouded white with a sediment deposit or an overabundance of calcium. They weren’t sure which and weren’t sure they wanted to know.

It was a fire hazard. It was destined to be an ongoing work in progress. It was perfect.

But Sam was right about one thing: the wallpaper in the hall had to come down.

It had always been on the to-do list, even though they didn’t hate the tired green and faded maroon-and-gold stripes, the delicate flowering along the lines. But age had spotted the paper in some places and yellowed it in others. It needed replacing, and Steve wanted to paint all of the rooms to emphasize the lighting and space. He didn’t feel much like painting anymore, but it needed doing.

He scoured holes in the wallpaper until it looked uncomfortably savaged, and then he mixed fabric softener with hot water to match. He sprayed the solution and waited until it had soaked in and left the wall approaching a consistency of not-solid. “Guess you’re right,” Steve said, remembering when they signed for the mortgage. “I’m the guy ripping down the wallpaper.”

He got a putty knife and set to work.

It took hours of labor. The wallpaper peeled away as if it were a face mask, but it got stuck sometimes, and Steve had to work his back into scraping the remnants and then the adhesive residue from the surface. The plastic drop sheet collected the scraps, and Steve’s knees dampened as he kneeled along the baseboards to make sure every bit of the paper was gone. Every so often, he wiped the clammy sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and thought, _It wasn’t work when it was done with you._

And Steve didn’t feel—good about it, exactly. It was difficult, seeing the wallpaper in ruins and the surface beneath so naked. He wasn’t certain he had the emotional stability to put something better over it. 

After a while, he just sat on his ass in the remnants and felt sweaty, hollow, and overcome. He put his face in his hands. 

He gave himself eight minutes. That was plenty. 

Then he smeared his tears away, took a shuddery breath, and got back to work. He pulled a long swath of paper from the baseboard to near the ceiling. It floated down and covered him like a veil, and the burst of mindless gratification took Steve by surprise from the left field.

 

**viii.**

 

Steve’s recovery was flat-footed and meandering, marked by a steady span of normalcy followed by odd setbacks. Part of Steve worried that Bucky’s primary motivation when he suggested sharing an apartment with him—a real _commitment_ that couldn’t be taken back—was to keep an eye on Steve. He’d been sleeping on Steve’s sofa for several weeks by that point, with half of his closet in Steve’s and a beat-up mug that he used for coffee, orange juice, and water alike on the stovetop. 

Steve’s old place was more of a storage unit than a home. He’d never settled after his mom died. The lock was broken on his door and there was very little hot water. Bucky hated it.

But he stayed. He stayed and he banged around the kitchen and he complained about the noise of the neighbors. _Come back to mine_ , he begged Steve. _You can’t get a lick of sleep here, can you?_

_I thought about finding somewhere new_ , Steve said. _Whole nine yards—mortgage, property taxes, DIY nightmares._

Bucky sagged. There were dark circles under his eyes, pressed into his skin like burns. _Thank christ. You wanna go in together?_

Maybe Steve should’ve said no. He should’ve questioned Bucky’s readiness to put their names on paper and make permanent arrangements ( _promises_ of a sort). But Steve was hurting; he was tired, he was worried about the remaining months on Bucky’s contract, when previously they hadn’t so much as gone to the mess hall without each other, and he felt sick in his love for him, the only cure the constant reminder of their ease and comfort side by side. It couldn’t be so bad, loving Bucky, when he made it so easy.

_Are you sure?_ he asked, hedging.

Bucky leaned forward on the sofa, his hands hooked together loosely. _Steve_ , he said seriously, eyes dark, _you don’t gotta do this alone. I’m with you until the end of the line._

Now, Steve thought about that promise a lot. They’d pinned so much on the idea that their lines were identical in length, too headstrong to entertain otherwise, too wound together to sense how abruptly each could end. When they were little, Rebecca had gotten hold of a palmistry book and demanded their cooperation in practicing. She held her brother’s hand, already bigger than hers by two spans, and studied the webwork of his story. _Your life line is hella short_ , she said. _Better not walk under any pianos tomorrow_. And they had laughed together.

 

**ix.**

 

Steve laid out a new plastic drop cloth on the floor in the hall, pinning it down at one end with a can of primer. He’d gone two days ignoring the naked walls in favor of caulking the windows, certain that the cold spells he was experiencing meant fall would end early and he needed to winterize. Now the windows were sealed, although the living area’s needed replacing with double-pane glass, and he had no other excuses to avoid the hall.

“I’m going to do this tomorrow,” he announced to the empty apartment. “The primer and paint are _right there_ so I’m not going to avoid it.”

He’d started talking to himself. When Sam called to check up on him, he didn’t ask if that was normal. It was just a thing. It was a thing Steve was going to do until he didn’t feel like he had to anymore.

Bucky had been the one to pick the paint colors. Soft dove gray with a smoky blue baseboard and trim. He’d steered Steve away from his more enthusiastic choices— _your inner art geek is showing_ —and wanted something that wouldn’t take away from pictures they might hang on the walls.

_How many pictures do you think we have?_ Steve asked, doubtful.

_That kind of stuff grows over time_ , Bucky said, wrinkling his nose at the sample swatches. _I give it less than five years before we cover the paint._

Steve was so taken aback by the idea that he let Bucky get first pick. The line at the checkout counter was lengthy and he stood there with his arms full of supplies, sneaking glances at Bucky as a warm, full sensation built a staircase inside of him. He knew if he could see himself there’d be color in his ears. It was the first moment he wondered if maybe he _could_ tell Bucky. 

He knew Bucky would understand. But he hadn’t imagined reciprocation.

_I don’t own a camera_ , he said.

It’d been a full fifteen minutes of haggling on paint for the kitchen cupboards between that conversation and the checkout line, but Bucky rolled his eyes to the heavens. _Wait ‘til Christmas_ , he said.

 

**x.**

 

In the morning, Steve was slow to rise. He struggled to put one foot over the other as he got out of bed, all of his extremities numb. It would be a bad day for him. He wasn’t sure whether his injury was acting out or if he was actually _freezing_ , but the room was so frigid that a cold burn inched down his throat, gaining ground. It would be just his luck if the radiator kicked it now. 

He padded into the hall, expecting to flinch at the crinkle of plastic under his feet.

It was gone.

Steve went very still, confused. He gazed down the hall toward the kitchen for a while, unsure of what he was seeing, then turned back toward the other end of the hall that was lit by a small window. There he found the plastic sheet, bundled into a fat curl around a table they hadn’t adorned yet. Some kind of draft, he realized—the windows had been caulked, but maybe the door, maybe the fire escape in the kitchen.

As he bent to unravel it, the front door shut.

Steve froze.

He was awake. He _heard_ that.

His breathing was coming clipped, his head pounding in time with his heart. He dragged the plastic sheet halfway down the hall before he gave up—he couldn’t imagine cracking open a paint can and dealing with the fumes like this—and went to the take a look at the front door. It was closed, of _course_ it was, and both sets of locks were in place.

Steve pressed his hand against the wood grain, then his forehead. He counted his heartbeat per minute. Then he went to make coffee and pulled out the bottle of vodka instead. There was no longer any reason to hoard it and he had plenty of worms hungry for kindling.

 

**xi.**

 

“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” Sam told him over the sizzle of the sausage and potatoes frying in the skillet. “You’re listening for something, so you hear it. That’s all it is. It’s the same reason people hear their cell phone ringing in another room when it’s next to their elbow.”

“I know,” Steve grumbled. He wasn’t sure why he told Sam, except that normally he would’ve told Bucky and that wasn’t an option anymore. “I just wish it’d stop. It’s a punch in the gut every time it happens.”

Sam scraped at the bottom of the skillet with a spatula. He made a noise—commiserating—and waved his hand, _gimme, gimme_.

Steve got up from the table to get the plates.

“Rebecca come over?” Sam asked, dishing out lunch.

“Not yet.”

“Wasn’t that supposed to happen soon?”

“Danny had to go to the dentist,” Steve said, fishing in the silverware drawer. “He wrecked his bike and chipped a tooth. I told her not to worry about it. She can come by whenever. Not like I go out much.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, “about that.”

“Lunch first, lecture after.”

“Fair enough. But if you want some help, we don’t have to wait for her. There’ll be some things you can box and label without her say-so. I could help, if you wanted.”

“I’m not in any hurry to clear out his stuff,” said Steve.

“Neither was I,” Sam agreed peaceably. “But after Riley’s stuff was squared, I did feel better. The line between memory and mausoleum is a thin one, big guy.”

Steve carried the plates to the table and let Sam have the chair close to his. He sat and thought about that, spearing a chunk of plump sausage with his fork. It was good—it always was, except for one dry roast that Sam considered a black mark on his record and Bucky had never let him hear the end of—and he ate steadily, relying on the rote necessity of fueling his body to move him. It was a trick that never failed him in the army and it’d sure proved its usefulness lately.

The pepper and potatoes were like butter in his cheek. He chewed and closed his eyes and swallowed. “This was going to be his last tour,” he said. “I thought maybe—after he came back, we could try something new.”

“Yeah,” said Sam.

“Yeah?”

“I figured.” He watched Steve eat with a sort of weariness that Steve couldn’t define, too tangled up in his own ill-named emotions. “You bought a fixer-upper. He got one set of towels for the both of you, and said he was ready to put down some roots. You don’t put down roots unless you mean to grow somethin’ bigger than you have.”

“He might not’ve meant it like that,” Steve said.

“Steve. He’s gone. Whether he did or not, he’d want you to have that if it’s any comfort.”

His throat got small and his eyes prickled, stung. Whatever comfort it brought him was brackish, but Steve stomached it all the same. “This was going to be his last tour,” he said again.

“The time’ll come around,” said Sam, “when that’s gonna make you angry.”

At who? Steve was already angry but only at himself. If it weren’t for him, Bucky would’ve stayed in Brooklyn and gotten into the family business. He’d be down at the hardware store on Eleventh and Walnut counting inventory for 0.25-inch bolts and digging through boxes full of styrofoam peanuts for stainless steel faucet knobs. They’d be eating beans and living out of Mrs. Barnes’ basement, but they’d be living.

 

**xii.**

 

The cupboards were finally reassembled. Steve scrubbed the kitchen clean and found a pencil box full of magnets that Bucky had collected from his late-night trips to the corner store: the Empire State building, an apple with the predictable “Big Apple” blazed across it, a rubber map of Queens, four identical bottles of Smirnoff, Lady Liberty wearing sunglasses.

He stuck the magnets on the freezer. He made sure Lady Liberty was surrounded by a treasure trove of Smirnoff, which was no doubt what Bucky had intended. Let himself laugh at it.

It was a productive day. Steve crammed all of his laundry into one basket and made the trip by elevator to the basement, where the building supplied a few stacked, grudgingly operational washers and dryers. The basement smelled metallic, a penny sucked too long against the molars. It was broken into small rooms, each more cramped than the last, and a long hallway that always vanished into the black. Most of the rooms were storage, filled with an explosion of left-behind junk. One room was filled with nothing but bicycles and door plaques. The laundry was at the end. _A funhouse gauntlet,_ Bucky called it.

In between switching out the load, Steve armed himself with heavy-duty latex gloves, uncovered the big hole in the wall of the coat closet, and cleaned out all the crud stuck back there. Something had tried to use the cotton candy-pink insulation as a nest, but it’d long since been shredded and greased to complete ruin. Crumbled plaster, dirt, cobwebs, and what looked like—stringy human hair?—came out in fistfuls until Steve could see, at last, the woodwork beneath.

The mess went in a garbage bag, the bag went by the door to be thrown, and Steve took a shower to get rid of the itchy, raw phantom on his exposed skin.

He got back too early for the last load to finish. The dryer rumbled and bucked, and Steve leaned on its comforting heat with a long wavering noise. It was the perfect height to rest his cheek against.

_How you gonna plug up that hole_? Bucky asked. 

In his head, of course.

“Well, Buck,” he said, hugging the dryer, “I figured I’d stuff it with newspaper, glue, and good intentions.”

_Shit. You would._

The dryer quieted and beeped at him. He thought about how maybe he could handle this after all, which was a nicer thought than knowing he had to.

 

**xiii.**

 

“I don’t want you think I’m avoiding you,” said Rebecca. She sounded about two sheets from flying away in the wind. Tired, in that special way only a mother could be.

“I don’t think that. I’ve got it easy. There’s nothing to worry about here except me, anymore.” Steve sandwiched the cell phone between his cheek and shoulder, freeing up a second hand as he ran hot water over his dinner plate in the sink. “You’ve got a kid, a job.”

“That’s not true and you know it. There’s nothing easy about it.”

“Exactly my point. You’ll come when you can come.”

“The thing is,” she said, “I keep worrying that maybe I _am_ avoiding it. Not you. Never you. But seeing his things, having to… Maybe unconsciously, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Steve put the plate out to dry on the dish towel spread across the counter. He didn’t know what to say. He was pretty sure she was right.

“I’ve been having restless dreams,” Rebecca said, after a while. “I had a real doozy last night. No one likes to hear about someone else’s dreams, I know. But it was so real, my teeth are still sunk in it, Stevie. I feel like my son isn’t real when I look at him. That’s how much it got to me.”

That was a feeling Steve understood. Sometimes even looking out the window by the fire escape, he had an idea that maybe nothing beyond it existed, that a boundary could be more than brick and glass. “You can tell me,” he said.

“Last night, it was Mrs. Coleman. You remember Mrs. Coleman? It must’ve been twelve years ago, something like that.”

“Yeah, I remember. Unit 3B.”

“She used to cough that smoker’s cough all night long,” she said. “Coughed ‘til it sounded like her heart would fall out of its cavity. Everything she had smelled like cabbage and PineSol—the lemon kind. I could hear her in my bedroom. Sometimes it was so close, it sounded like she was in my room with me. I used to wake up scared she was.”

“Bucky said that, too,” said Steve, remembering.

“That’s what I dreamt. I found a hole in my wall that was still wet, and I went through, and then I kept going through until I was a little girl again. I was in our apartment building, that hallway with the snotty lights and the cabbage smell. No one else was there, though. Just me and Mrs. Coleman. Her door was open. I could see them again—the needlework on her wall, rows and rows of peonies—and she was coughing, Steve, so close I felt it in my chest, just coughing her lungs and her bones and her heart out, hunched over. It was exactly the same.”

“’Becca—”

“It was _exactly the same_. I know how it sounds. I wasn’t scared. I’m still not scared.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “What happened?”

Rebecca laughed in that same strained, exhausted timber her brother used to take on after an all-nighter. “I hung a bell on her door knob. She spat in her hand, and it was suddenly quiet, and she looked up at me. She said something about ringers. I don’t remember. She said not to worry, there were two floors. I remember that. There was brown muck on her fingers, alight under the lamp. I woke up.” She said, too, “I don’t feel like I’ve woken up at all.”

Steve said, “Huh.” He walked out into the living room but something hard pushed up into the sole of his foot. “Ow!”

“Steve?”

“Nothing,” he reassured her, lifting his foot and leaning down at the same time to squeeze it. “Just stepped on something.”

It was one of the magnets. Lady Liberty in sunglasses, far from home.

He picked the magnet up and stared at it. In his ear, Rebecca said, “I just need to sleep. If I could sleep and not remember it, I’d feel better.”

 

**xiv.**

 

Bucky hadn’t always left home when he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes he would go no farther than the living room to stare out the many faces of the windows, searching, maybe, for something in the streets and skies and monochrome patterns. It wasn’t uncommon for Steve to check for him and see Bucky standing there: silent and still, a silhouette balancing on its heels in the dark.

The first time, it scared Steve. By the third, he was only glad Bucky hadn’t spirited himself out the door.

Used to be, Steve would make him some coffee, apply a generous shot of butterscotch vodka, and coax him to sit. Bucky could always be persuaded to sit if he thought Steve needed to. Maybe they’d talk—maybe they wouldn’t. More than once, Bucky fell asleep there and Steve would have to curl his fists tight enough to pinch the skin to keep from touching his hair, grown longer as of late. He watched over him until he had to sleep, too, or if it was close enough, until the watery morning sun touched on the floorboards and the curve of Bucky’s ear.

That was why Steve—who woke half past three to a queasy unfolding of reality and stumbled toward the kitchen for a glass of water, guided by memory and shapes in the pitch—looked into the living room by habit. He wasn’t thirsty so much as unsettled. His dreams had been absorbing and sticky-fingered, difficult to shake. Maybe Rebecca’s fault, maybe his own.

All the lights in the units across the street were out. But the soft-punch streetlights were beaded in the water on the windows—it must have rained—and Steve let the mosaic lure him into the room.

Maybe Bucky had felt this way. Untethered. Unmoored.

Steve wished he’d asked him more often. There was a lot he’d never said. He never thought they had to. But maybe Steve could’ve asked for more. Maybe if he had, he would’ve had the guts to spill his own. Without any of the stakes that existed before, he could feel those words waiting to bubble over, rushed to readiness. _I love you in the damn-near-forever sort of way,_ he would’ve said. _The kind that grafts into your bones, says prayers in your name. It planted itself like a tree in me and said it’d never move. It grew. It towered._

He’d never let himself imagine what would happen afterwards, although he examined it strategically, assessing it as if it were a field operation. It made him cautious. All along, he should’ve treated it like a piece of art. Like any organic thing, he might have come to find Bucky staring out these windows in the dead of night and gone to him, taken his hand, folded them into a new composition, and led him to bed. He would’ve touched the curve of Bucky’s ear as it glowed like a hot brick in the new sun.

He stood in that half-shared world where it didn’t matter that Bucky was dead for as long as the world would keep him. It started raining again and the sound gained momentum. It was like waking up. Slowly, Steve became aware that he was tired and cold and no one was coming to coax him back to bed.

When he turned to head back, a man was standing in the hall.

 

**xv.**

 

Steve didn’t get a good look at him.

It was dark.

He had an impression of the shape of him: hanging head, big swaying frame. The slightest movement to separate him from shadows.

It was dark.

Then it sank back into the hall, out of sight.

Steve didn’t have his gun. There was a hammer spilling out of the tool box by the window. He picked it up and walked, carefully, across the living room floor with its squeaky floorboards. He passed the light switch. He didn’t use it.

Hefting the hammer up by his temple, ready to strike, he crept into the hall. The small window at the end illuminated the stretch, but there was no one there.

Steve swung open the bathroom door and checked every corner, including behind the shower curtain. His reflection was dead white and unfocused. His bedroom, too, was empty, and he at last flicked on the light so that he could be sure when he opened his closet door that it only secreted away Steve’s shirts and shoes.

Bucky’s room was still closed up. He stood in front of the door for a long time.

He couldn’t hear anything. But the apartment no longer felt empty.

Without taking his eyes off of the door, Steve walked backwards into his bedroom. He sank down on the end of his mattress, laying the hammer across his thigh. He stared at the door, a composite set of stark lines in the sallow fall of light, unwavering despite his fatigue, fixed on every noise and creak.

He was watching four hours later when the sun came up.


	2. midnight

**xvi.**

 

Bruce hated doing book signings.

It was a guaranteed and much-needed jump in book sales—he wouldn’t argue with that. His work might be bank-rolled by Tony Stark, but Tony’s generosity was more often focused on new technology, toys, and merchandise that prompted Bruce to make a “classic face.” The more mundane needs—food, rent, cardigans—were blips on his radar. So when the bank account was clipping bottom, Bruce spent half a week in meditation shoring up his reserves of patience and called his agent, who was possibly the only person more socially awkward than Bruce himself.

It wasn’t that Bruce was ungrateful, either. People who bought and read his books? People who _believed_ in his life’s work? He’d take them any day over the assholes who laughed at him and treated him with derision. It’d been years since his fall from grace, but he hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to be mocked out of the scientific community.

However, the nature of his work meant that for every person with a real scientific or emotional connection to the text, there were four others who were just _weird_. 

“It was providence you’re here tonight, Dr. Banner,” said one of those very same weirdos. “I almost couldn’t believe it. But here you are. And here I am.”

“Here we are,” Bruce agreed, flipping open the book in front of him. He scrawled a customary note on the inside cover— _keep searching!_ —in felt tip pen. “Name?”

“You’ve been looking for proof,” she said. “ It’s proof I can give you. I can speak to them, Dr. Banner. I can see them, roaming the streets—”

“Look, that’s the kind of stuff you need to route through the office,” he said, not for the first time. “If you’ve got something you want to share with the class, great. I don’t _disbelieve_ you. But there are channels, okay? I’m just here to sign some books.”

“I have an angel who inhabits my physical form,” she said, louder. “A presence—a light that fills my entire being—”

“Hey, please,” Bruce begged, wishing he hadn’t emptied his coffee cup thirty minutes prior. “Can I just get a name?”

“Bethelzandra.”

“Not the angel’s name. Yours.”

She stared at him, her jaw ticking. “Jessica,” she said sullenly.

Bruce added her name to personalize the message, then his own. He shut the book, slid it across the table, and found a less-pained smile for her. “No one has all the answers, Jessica. But I hope you find some of them.”

“You’re kind of an asshole,” she said, and left with her book.

_Bethelzandra sounds like a made-up name_ , he thought, a little spitefully. But it didn’t hold; she was the last of the line, leaving behind an emptying bookstore and rows of chairs that had never filled entirely. The acne-marked teenager manning the register was beginning to eye the door with a hopeful gleam, likely entertaining the idea of closing up shop early. The only patrons left were an older woman fingering the spines on the cookbooks and a tall handsome man hunched over a book in the reading area. He didn’t look like he was enjoying, or understanding, its content.

Bruce counted what was left of his inventory. It wasn’t a bad night—maybe not enough to cover the rent, but enough to take the edge off.

His cell phone buzzed. He picked it up.

_wanna stay overnight in asylum this wknd_

“Tony, no,” Bruce said.

Then he texted the same thing.

_we can make crappy utub video_ came the next text. _clint down to bang sum doors_

“Excuse me,” someone said.

Bruce looked up from his partial message, which was largely about the amount of things Clint was down to bang—he wasn’t actually going to send it—and the tall handsome man was in front of his table. There was a book in his hand. It was Bruce’s book, actually.

“I don’t want to bother you if you’re packing up for the night,” the guy said, with a level amount of respect that was immediately appealing. “I just had some questions. About your book.”

Bruce thought about it. “You’re not sharing your body with any celestial or dead or radiant entities, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” the guy said after a long moment of thinking about it, too.

“I think they’re actually closing up,” Bruce said, apologetic. “But… I was about to get a coffee down the street. If you’re interested in joining me?” He wouldn’t normally offer, was the thing. He wasn’t entirely sure why he did now.

Maybe it was because Bruce could tell, these days. There was a certain face—a weathered veneer—that spoke of freshly tilled grief. Death was the ultimate equalizer. It brought everyone to their knees in the same way, on the same stone.

 

**xvii.**

 

The coffee tasted like burnt tar. Exactly how Bruce liked it.

Steve, as he’d been introduced, looked dubious at best. He peeled open a creamer and then a second one, upending both into his cup. “You come here a lot?”

“Look around you. The heartbeat of New York is crammed in this shoebox-sized coffee house,” Bruce told him. “That’s really annoying, but the coffee is good.”

“This is awful.” A shadow drew over his face—he was thinking of someone else, Bruce realized—and was gone. “Not that I’m not grateful. It’s good of you to ask me along.”

“I know what it’s like to have questions,” said Bruce.

Steve bit into his cheek, hard. It was noticeable even to Bruce. He tasted his coffee and made another face, then ripped open a sugar packet.

“That’s a cue,” Bruce said. “For you to ask them, I mean.”

“I feel a little stupid.”

“I _wrote_ the book. What’s the book called, Steve?”

Steve looked at him. Despite a visible struggle not to, he smiled. “ _A Spirited Study: Emerging Science of the Paranormal_.”

“That was definitely not my original title. But the point stands.”

This time when Steve sipped his coffee, it seemed to pass muster. He made Bruce wait a while longer, but he did work himself up to it, and when he did the nature of the question surprised Bruce, who’d expected something a little more philosophical. “There’s a chapter. The one about residual hauntings and—Stone Tape theory, I think you called it. Where it says what we think are ghosts are only memories and impressions strong enough to be stored in the energy around us. How could that possibly hold up, though, when our world changes so much?”

“You’re talking about Babbage and Lethbridge,” said Bruce. “Transference of motion between particles allowing for a kind of stored energy, one that manifests physically and sometimes visually after the event, or person, is long gone. Basically, a closed loop of replay. It’s an interesting idea, but I can’t argue much for it because of the very reason you just pointed out. Even if it were possible for energy to capture a memory, energy doesn’t attach itself to a place, a person, an objective—not in any permanent way. Hauntings are known for being fairly static to _something_. Of course, I can’t _disprove_ it, so into the book it goes.”

Steve rubbed his face. “Even supposing there is such a thing as ghosts…”

“Ah, a skeptic. You’re my favorite.”

“Even supposing, there has to be some level of awareness, right? If it were only—residual, following its same steps—it wouldn’t be able to notice the changes in its environment. How can it deviate from a pattern and interact if it’s never known those changes?”

“Well, say…”

“Say, if you brought something into your home,” said Steve. “And then somebody took an interest in moving it around.”

Bruce lifted his eyebrow. Half of his cup was gone; he finished off the rest and realized it was going to be a three-cup conversation at least. 

“There’s reasonably solid evidence that most hauntings are residual,” he said after organizing his thoughts. “I’ve been on a number of investigations at this point with my team—obviously, you know that—and nine times out of ten, on the off-chance we capture something, it’s supportive of that. Footsteps upstairs. A door shuts. A loved item shows up somewhere else. Even partial and full-body apparitions trace their living haunts, walking the same corridors, lingering in the same rooms. That’s why the Stone Tape theory, while flawed, has a foundation that holds true. TV will try and tell you otherwise, but it’s pretty rare to encounter an active and engaged haunt.”

“But not impossible,” said Steve.

“No,” Bruce allowed. “Not impossible. Maybe it’s down to how much is left. I think it’s inarguable that ghosts are only a fraction of what they once were, no matter the ultimate composition. There’s a reason we call them _shades_. A level of awareness demands a higher functioning consciousness, if we can attribute that to something made out of energy. But if you read the book, you know there’s some evidence of that, too.”

“Like, uh, poltergeists,” said Steve. “The Bell Witch haunting. The Perron family. And that couple in Los Angeles. The Lanes.”

“Most stories have a logical explanation. But I knew the Lanes,” Bruce admitted, “and that house was a rat’s nest of bad juju. Greg’s wife was so scared, her hair starting falling out. She still can’t sleep without every light in the house on and a pint of beer in her stomach. They don’t live there anymore, of course.”

“They were horrible stories.”

Bruce shrugged, hooking his arm over the back of the booth. “Not always. Sometimes you hear nice things. A few years back, Tony and I visited this little old man in Queens who swore black and blue that his late brother was checking in on him from time to time. Said he could smell his pipe at night. Sometimes he’d forget to take his pills and there’d be one on the bedside table when he woke up. Probably just a cold comfort, but we did some EVP sessions in there and let me tell you, someone had something to say.”

“Like what?”

“Like… _it’s no good, Davie_. That was the old man’s name, David Schwarzkopf. _Spring kept me._.”

“That wasn’t in the book,” Steve said.

“No. Not sensational enough. Horror sells, Steve.”

Steve exhaled. His bottom lip was marked from his teeth, and he looked tired, very tired. “I’m not sure I believe any of it,” he admitted. 

“I didn’t. Once.”

“What changed?”

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question. Bruce let himself think about her for a heartbeat—the soft dark fall of her hair, the chemical smell that lingered on her clothes, her gravel-lined chortle—the syrup-slow moment he’d been suspended from the seatbelt as the car turned, how he dreamt of it even now—and of course, the reason he’d had to leave the lakeside home they built up together. Time didn’t erase the pain, but it gave him techniques to shoulder it. 

“I had a wake-up call,” he said. “We can’t see dark matter either, but we know it exists because how it affects what’s around it. I did see something. I know it exists. Now I chase ghosts.”

Steve studied him. Whatever he found, it eased the tension in his shoulders and let him slump back into the booth’s padding. “Hypothetically,” he said, “if I wanted to make contact with—a ghost. How would I?”

“Un-hypothetically, that would be a very bad idea.”

“I already told you I don’t believe any of this,” Steve pointed out. “There’s no harm in telling me.”

“No, that’d be the worst thing I could do. If you don’t believe in the dangers, you won’t appreciate them.” Bruce leaned forward, trying to hold his gaze. “Steve. I don’t know who you lost. But I know how much it must hurt. Believe me when I tell you, this is _not_ a door you want to open alone.”

“So the Ouija board is a no-go,” said Steve, shuttering a piece of himself off. It was a trick Bruce used often enough.

“Look.” It wasn’t something he ever did. It wasn’t something he was sure he should do now. Bruce dug in his satchel, though, and found the packet of glossy business cards Tony had printed for him, never unbound from the rubber band. “It’s just a feeling, but it sounds like you could be in some trouble. If you are—even if you’re not _sure_ you are—you can reach me at this number.” He slid the card across the table until the corner pricked into Steve’s thumb. “No judgment. No questions asked.”

The card read STARK INVESTIGATIONS, INC. in blocky letters. Steve picked it up, slow-like, and said thanks in an absentminded tone.

“And for what it’s worth,” Bruce said, “I’m sorry.”

Steve looked at him.

Bruce did his best to be the face he would’ve wanted to see after losing Betty. It wasn’t the kind of face easy to make, so he suddenly forgave everyone for failing to manifest it.

“Thanks,” said Steve, with some difficulty. “For that. For all of this. And the coffee.”

“Anytime,” he said, and actually meant it.

“I’ve always known the score,” Steve told him, sliding out of the booth. “Truth is, nobody needs a ghost to be haunted.”

 

**xviii.**

 

He’d forgotten how noisy the rest of the world was. The traffic and bicycle bells and radios blaring out the shop doors were as abrasive as sandpaper. It no longer felt like such a bad thing, coming home to his lonely apartment with only silence to greet him.

Only, there were three magnets on the floor.

Steve took them in: the placement a foot from the front door, far beyond the kitchen tiles; the equal spacing between them. Lady Liberty. The Empire State building, upside down. The map of Queens. Just yesterday, he’d put Lady Liberty back in the pencil box where he’d found her on account of her inability to stay in one place.

He picked them up. He put them all back in the pencil box.

Bucky’s bedroom door was open.

He checked—of course he did—but the room was empty. It no longer smelled like anything except dust, a space un-lived in. Nothing was out of place. Steve sat on Bucky’s bed, the coverlet stone cold from being cut off from the rest of the apartment, and was overcome all at once with a prickling sense of despair, which had only crept along the baseboards until now.

 

**xix.**

 

He tried an experiment. He took the silver rings that had belonged to Bucky’s grandfather from his room and arranged them on the hallway table. For two nights, they were undisturbed. One of the nights was so cold, Steve had to take all of the blankets out of the linen closet and bury in them for any kind of relief. It didn’t seem to matter what state the radiator was in; when it was cold, it was cold. He thought he heard footsteps in the hallway; when he listened closely, they instead seemed to come from the couple next door.

On the third night, the rings were gone. 

But they weren’t in Bucky’s room. After a few hours of searching, Steve at last found them scattered like spent bullets in the coat closet where he’d patched the hole in the wall. They were arranged in the empty space in no particular pattern. Just waiting for him to find them.

Mostly, he was a little pissed off.

“It’s like you’re doing it just to prove me wrong,” he said to the closet. 

_Keepin’ you on your toes_ , said Bucky, who was dead and gone everywhere but in Steve’s head. Steve’s brain was the Stone Tape. Bucky was stored there, still butting in to be an asshole.

“You don’t even like these rings,” Steve said. “You just felt obligated to keep them. Maybe I want them in the hallway.”

_Maybe I don’t_ , said Bucky.

“Maybe you’re dead and you don’t get a vote.”

_Now you’re just being a jerk. My name’s still on the lease, ain’t it?_

Steve scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his arm, angry at himself. There was no “maybe” about it—he regretted immediately saying otherwise—and the facsimile of Bucky’s ribbing was nowhere near as rich and varied as the real thing. He wasn’t being haunted by Bucky. He _wasn’t_. If there was something here, something strange, it was older than his own personal tragedies. Something built into the building, maybe, that had left its threads spooled in every corner, catching on the living remnants as they all passed down the dead walk. Whatever tugged from the other end needed no name.

He put the rings back in Bucky’s bedroom. He kept the door shut. 

The hallway still wasn’t painted. It looked pinched, as if it had drawn in its walls and was holding its breath.

**xx.**

 

Rebecca came in the rain, her hair a frizzy halo around her scalp. She had parallel parked on the street in her tiny car filled with flattened cardboard boxes. Steve went down to help her carry them up, and was relieved she didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the temperature in the apartment. He’d been walking in and out of cold spots all morning, the hairs on his arms lifting in unison.

She gave him a wan smile. “How you holding up, Steve?”

“You know how it goes,” he said. “Day by day.”

“Yep,” she said. “Shitty day by shitty day.”

“Through here.” Gesturing, he led her into the hallway and to Bucky’s room. It was open for the occasion. “Sorry about the mess. I need to put the primer on so I can get to covering the walls.”

“It’s nice,” she said. “I wish I’d been here before. It felt like we had plenty of time for that, I guess.”

Without asking, Steve knew what she meant. They’d all thought that. Wasn’t it what Bucky and him had talked about overseas and when they were buying? Having Bucky’s family over for dinner and games. Alternating Thanksgivings. The dumb, kind of tiring things. The _normal_ things.

“You’re always welcome,” Steve told her. “I know it’s just me, but…”

“Oh Steve.” Rebecca squeezed his bicep. “I’d like that. You’ve got a family in us, you know. That hasn’t changed.”

It had. But telling her wouldn’t help anything, and Steve was lonely enough to want to keep that door open. He gave her a brief hug in thanks. Skin to skin contact was almost a shock. Her hair smelled like artificial apple, and she gave him an extra squeeze before letting go.

“All right,” she said then. “To arms, men.”

It wasn’t the battle they’d anticipated. Bucky had told Steve he was mostly unpacked, but that was obviously a blatant lie—at least a quarter of his things were still in moving boxes, some piled in the closet and some lounging around the room. He’d gotten lazy halfway through the endeavor. One of the boxes was being used as an underwear and sock drawer; he’d been living out of it like a suitcase.

“How’s your mom and dad?” Steve asked, picking through one of the still-full boxes. It was crammed with old cassette tapes and vinyl. Bucky hadn’t even owned a record player.

“Gray. Their faces, their skin.... I hate looking at them.” Rebecca dropped an armful of shirts from the closet onto the bed, then went back for more. “I know we’re supposed to be there for each other. But I think it’ll be a while before I can handle their grief on top of mine.” 

“I thought they might come.”

“I don’t think they can do it.” She fingered the soft sleeve of a flannel shirt, exhaling. “Not even sure I can. Jesus. Is this all we amount to, Steve? Four hundred square feet of stuff. Most of it’ll outlast his body.”

A chill slivered its way up Steve’s spine and clung to him. He shook it free of his shoulders and taped the box of junk shut, scrawling DONATION on its face. 

“Sorry,” said Rebecca.

“It’s okay. He would’ve been the same way. Probably would’ve said worse, actually.”

“Do you want any of his clothes?” she asked after a minute. “You’re about the same size, aren’t you? They’ll just go to Goodwill otherwise.”

“Maybe.” He couldn’t stomach the idea now, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t want them later. He remembered Bucky’s jacket, the worn supple leather, the spiced smell of his smoke on it. It had to be around here somewhere. “Yeah. Yeah, I might. Can’t wear his jeans, though—those can go.”

“Anything else? I should have asked. There’s some things Mom and Dad will want, and some things I do, too. I should have asked you.”

Steve had thought about it at length. He was no closer to finding an answer. What he wanted was intangible; what he wanted was gone. The idea of condensing Bucky’s presence in his life to a small collection of _things_ —a bowl of movie tickets on the dresser, a few shirts that wouldn’t last the turn of the decade, his toolbox, his Zippo lighter—was unbearable.

“We bought most of the stuff here together,” Steve said finally. “There’s plenty of him knocking around in every drawer.” _Knocking around at night, too_ , he thought with a manic edge of humor.

“Are you going to keep the place?”

“I’m going to try.”

The last of the clothes were in a miserable knot on the mattress. Behind the shirts there was a set of shelves that Bucky had filled with things he wouldn’t miss seeing every day. “Oh,” said Rebecca, and drew out a pile of brightly wrapped boxes. “Someone started his Christmas shopping early.”

He looked up despite himself. 

“This one’s for you,” Rebecca said, showing him the tag. It was the size and shape of a lunch box; the paper was from last year’s leftover roll of holly berry print. 

Steve felt leaden. “It’s a camera.”

“How do you know?”

He didn’t feel like crying. He felt worse. “I know.”

 

**xxi.**

 

Before she left, and after all of Bucky’s things that would be leaving were packed away into the car, Rebecca did a slow loop around the living room. She looked everywhere but at Steve. Something was in the pocket of her saggy pink cardigan; she kept toying with it anxiously.

“I have something for you,” she said, lowly. “I should’ve given them to you before, but… I didn’t see you after his remains came home. And it was hard enough, as is.”

Steve’s head was a little clouded, so he took a seat. There was a strange pulse in his left ear, dampening sound intermittently. “It’s okay, ‘Becca,” he said. “I didn’t… I should’ve gone to the funeral.”

“I know why you didn’t.”

“All the more reason I should’ve.”

“No one thought worse of you, Stevie,” she said. “It must be hell. We aren’t blind. We wanted to be there for you, but—”

“I’m difficult,” Steve murmured. 

“You sure are. But he liked that, and once we got used to it, we liked it, too. That has nothing to do with it. Anyway, I’m not going to make excuses. But these are yours. Not for me to keep.” Rebecca drew her hand out of her pocket, dangling tin scraps on a chain. She went to Steve and let them pool in the palm of his hand.

The pressure in Steve’s ear blotted out what she said next; it was getting worse. He examined the dog tags and his own name stamped on them, bent to shit and back again. One was freckled with shrapnel.

“He had ‘em on him,” said Rebecca, softly.

Steve heard that one just fine.

“Oh honey,” she said.

Breathing was a faulty construct—an involuntary imperative that nevertheless ran on paper-thin structures and a single entrance no larger than a drain pipe. Steve felt that way more than ever. He had to concentrate to create measured, uniform inhales and exhales, and even then he could hear an audible waver beneath them. “I didn’t know he kept these,” he said when it was possible to.

“Yeah,” said Rebecca.

There wasn’t anything she could add to it. Steve appreciated she didn’t try.

The worst was still yet to come, though. After hugging her again and sending her car off, Steve went back up to the apartment. Emptiness ballooned in him and kept growing, and he was aware of Bucky’s room—no longer Bucky’s room—like it was an infected tooth, twinging at open air. He was gone. It was done.

It was done.

Steve had a strange sense of suspension—as if he were buoyant, caught between phases of the moon where Bucky existed in his world and where he didn’t. He could feel a headache stirring like a storm to the west, curling into his temple and behind his retinas, splintering his vision. It wasn’t a thing he knew could happen. It was happening.

Staggering, he left behind the dishes, his plans to call Sam, his ideas for _processing_ , and retreated to his bedroom. Some of Bucky’s shirts were still piled on the mattress in a small cocoon. The number of pipes were doubled. The shadows were refracted, falling at impossible angles.

Steve sunk into the pile of blankets and clothes. He closed his eyes and tried to find his way back.

 

**xxii.**

 

That night, the footsteps started.

Steve woke up to the creak of the floorboard by the kitchen; it had a distinctive whine and Bucky used to love to jimmy with it. He knew how much it annoyed Steve.

The absence of pain made Steve feel lightheaded—there was too much room in his body without it. He’d pushed his nose into Bucky’s jacket. He toyed with the zipper’s teeth, reluctant to leave its comfort.

Someone walked across the living area to the windows in five perfectly formed steps. It was like being in a dream again. It didn’t feel entirely real. He’d just been dreaming, actually, about a small package wrapped in newspaper and left in the rain, surrounded by a wreath of flares sputtering wild against the deluge. Dreams were like that—pieces he’d sewn clumsily together, a memory from his childhood twinned to the accident he’d passed on the walk home from the bookstore—but Steve was disquieted. He was still picturing the diorama in his mind. He wasn’t quite here.

At some point, the footfalls crossed his door. He didn’t look. In the rain, newsprint bled out to black and the flares, too, followed the world into the pitch.

 

**xxiii.**

 

He told Sam. He couldn’t _not_ tell Sam.

To his credit, Sam _mm-hmm_ ’d sporadically and then spent a good five minutes asking for “a minute” whenever Steve spoke up and contemplating the fine lines of the woodgrain in the flooring. He clapped his hands together, nodded to himself, and put on his “engaged” face. It was the worst face.

“This building is as old and crusty as my grandmother’s Bible, Steve,” he said. “I bet its noises have noises. I bet every time someone sneezes in the basement, you lose half a wall.”

“If it was just noises, I wouldn’t be talking to you,” Steve pointed out.

“Ouch. Feeling the love, big guy.”

“Explain the rings,” said Steve sullenly. “How about that, huh?”

Sam looked like he was going to say something but changed his mind halfway to fruition, and abruptly reversed course. “Okay. Let’s say we’ve got a real problem here,” he said. “Lord knows, if anyone in my family heard me comin’ down on you for believing in ghosts, I’d get an earful. Aunt Bel, she’d swear up and down from church to court that my late uncle was still rattling her shower curtain. So let’s _say_ , Steve, you are being haunted.”

“I know how it sounds.”

“How does it sound?” 

The words stuck in his throat, but he pushed them out. “Like I’m making excuses. I don’t—I don’t want him to be gone.”

“Sure,” Sam said easily enough. “But I’m your friend. I know you aren’t the kind of guy who would construct an elaborate fantasy to make yourself feel better. You don’t even _like_ feeling better.”

Steve wasn’t sure whether the concession helped. 

“The way I see it,” Sam continued, “you don’t hurt anything if you get yourself some sage, a priest, whatever, and clear out the home. If you’re being haunted, the spirit moves on. If you’re not, you’ve got peace of mind and your bathroom will smell less like damp cellar. That’s a win-win scenario.”

“What if I don’t want it to move on,” said Steve, because he had no impulse control.

“If it were Riley,” Sam said, “I’d tell him we’ll always have Paris. Then I’d drop a crate of sage on his ass and kick him out.” He smiled without any humor. “It’d cut me, Steve, but I loved him too well to pretend a shade will satisfy me.”

And because he couldn’t argue with that, Steve went out that afternoon to buy thick bundles of sage from the corner store. It was the same one Bucky used to frequent. They’d never gone together, but Steve wondered if he ought to say something to the braided woman at the register—if she ever wondered where he’d gone. Family-run, old-neighborhood kind of place. The kind of shop that had a Madonna in the back corner with half-melted candles, candy buttons instead of Mars bars, eggs and bread and apples and chicken and yeah, fresh uncut sage.

At the register, he picked up a Mets magnet. “This, too,” he said.

 

**xxiv.**

 

Steve took the sage home.

He didn’t use it.

The Mets magnet went on the freezer. Under it, he pinned Bruce Banner’s business card.

 

**xxv.**

 

Decisions were actions in themselves. Steve’s mom had taught him that, and he’d found it to be true. When he took the sage home and let the night go low without using it, he knew, without questioning his motives, he wasn’t likely to budge in that position. But that meant he had to own up to it.

If he didn’t want the spirit gone, that meant he wanted answers.

He wanted to know. He _had_ to know.

In the morning, the Mets magnet was twisted upside down. Steve observed this as he drank his coffee, perched on the edge of the table in a way the table itself wasn’t supportive of. Then he washed out his mug, put on his shoes and a hoodie, and went to the library.

He took a lot of notes. Some of it was crazy, but he took ‘em anyway. It was a four-day venture. Steve was pretty sure he was cultivating a reputation there that he didn’t deserve, but there was no way he was going to trust Wikipedia when it came to the occult.

_Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not sure this is any better_ , Bucky said.

“Yeah, but if I bought you a poetry magnet set, you’d just abuse it,” said Steve.

_You aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t make you right._

The weekend came. The footsteps at night were getting louder, lurching. Once or twice, they even woke Steve in a scare. He was sleeping with the gun in his bedside drawer. When he heard a door close, he no longer checked it.

He decided he was ready. 

 

**xxvi.**

 

“Let it be known that I think this is a terrible idea,” said Bruce.

“Let it be known Bruce Banner doesn’t appreciate creative genius,” Tony proclaimed to the room at large. “True creation isn’t the result of hours of computer simulation—although that helps—but inspiration, Bruce. _Inspiration_.”

“Yeah, that’s what this is,” said Clint, drinking out of the coffee pot. “Just. So inspiring.”

“Don’t start any more fires,” Natasha called from across the office, her legs crossed and propped up on the only meticulous desk space in the entire building. She held up a string of negatives to the light, squinting at them. “You know what Pepper said about the insurance company.”

“And I told Pepper to just throw more money at them,” said Tony. “I mean, do we even need insurance? Do we? I’m pretty sure I can pay out for my own repairs a thousand times over what they ever will.”

“Insurance is an adult thing,” Cliff added, scratching his nose. It had been badly broken falling down a flight of stairs during their last investigation. He was wearing a fold of tape over the bridge that had given up the fight at one end. “So, probably fake.”

“I appreciate you’ve created something remarkable, Tony,” Bruce tried again, and he was pleased he sounded more patient than he felt. “This could be a huge breakthrough. But doing a field test straight out the gate? In the basement of the landmark _Hilton_?”

“Hey, the Ghostbusters did it,” said Clint. 

“Don’t start that again,” Tony ordered, with that manic edge Bruce recognized from several sleepless nights. “We are a _serious_ scientific initiative—”

“You’re gonna set off an electromagnetic bomb in a hotel!”

“An electromagnetic bomb that’s going to disrupt very specific electrical and magnetic fields, specifically the ones most frequented by our sprightly little invisible friends. Think of what kind of data we could get! What’ll it do? How will it affect them? What if amplifying or distorting the fields amplifies their ability to respond? What does stripping the fields entirely do?”

“You’re gonna kill the ghosts,” said Clint in actual disapproval. Considering the state of Cliff’s life, Bruce considered that a little rich. 

“The ghosts are already dead,” said Tony.

“You’re gonna _pass_ the ghosts.”

“I’d like to set off a bomb,” Natasha said.

Bruce pressed fists into his eyes and gusted out a sigh. “Let’s not set anything off without some strictly controlled parameters. This has a blast radius of 100 _yards_ , Tony. That’s—so beyond necessary, I can’t even tell you. Not to mention, our work is supposed to focus on proving the existence of ghosts, not… this. Clint’s right, it’s a little Ghostbusters-esque.”

Tony put his arm around the bomb and sulked at him. “Got proof,” he said, which was true. “No one cared. People are assholes. You could wave an actual ghost in front of their faces and they’d still cry hoax.”

They all sobered at the reminder of what happened last year. It might’ve propelled Stark Investigations, Inc. from an investor’s fanciful hobby to a legitimate enterprise in a virtually unexplored field—but it also put them in the limelight in less pleasant ways. It was no secret that Tony, who because of his father’s empire had money and respect despite his “side project,” only felt a knock to his pride. The rest of them weren’t nearly so lucky. 

“You know,” said Bruce, finally, “people _are_ assholes. I guess a little electromagnetic bomb wouldn’t hurt the Hilton’s prospects.”

“Capitalism will be the fall of modern society,” Natasha said, which was basically an agreement.

Thor, their half-secretary and half-weirdness lightning rod, woke up from a nap on his desk with a sudden snort. His gold hair was a tangled mess. “Bad premonition,” he announced, bleary-eyed. “Most upsetting.”

“About the Hilton?” Clint asked. He bought into Thor’s self-proclaimed god-like clairvoyance more than the rest of them, or was at least vastly entertained by it. Bruce was of the opinion that Thor had parents with a weird sense of humor and also an incredible amount of both luck and uncanny instinct. They’d picked him up on a street corner and he’d never left.

“What is the Hilton.”

“Never mind.”

Bruce was surprised when Thor turned to him with a pointed frown. “You met a man,” he said. “You told him to call if he needed help.”

It was everyone else’s turn to look surprised. Well, they could join the party.

“He will,” said Thor.

 

**xxvii.**

 

Steve waited until nightfall. He turned on every light in every room but the living area, though, because he wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t going to jump at shadows. A few of the books he’d selected to check out were stacked in the living room. He gathered his collection—the candles, a small suede bag, a notebook and pencil, a jar of fine yellowing powder, a pouch of long-cold ash—and out of some wild hope, Bucky’s leather jacket. 

It turned out, New York had an answer for everything. It took a few field trips to find what he was looking for, but find it he did, crossing the counter of a lower-level shop in the Bronx with a painted plywood sign and shelf after shelf of things Steve didn’t know could be bought. Being there felt like stepping out of his reality and into a new one. 

Steve of one year ago wouldn’t have stepped foot in there.

_Playing with fire, Stevie,_ said Bucky.

Didn’t he know. Steve set the candles in a semi-circle, gauging the distance with the same eye that had laid the tiles crooked in the kitchen. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do. The ritual was unexpectedly mundane. Perfection wasn’t a requirement.

He lit each wick. Combined with the sallow light from the hallway pooling at his lap, the candlelight propelled itself in echoes, ripples upon ripples. “To bring our sight into focus,” Steve said, reading from the book spread flat beside him.

The notebook, he left open in front of his knees. “To let loose the tongue,” he recited.

The ash smeared in a fine layer across the floorboards. His palms were coated in it. It was greasy and old. “To remember the ruin,” he said, and then sprinkled the crushed seeds and brittle, ground-up molars over the mark. “To remember the life.”

A floorboard creaked.

Steve’s heart kicked faster despite himself. He didn’t look up. Untangling the suede bag’s drawstrings, he loosened them and drew its opening wide. Inside, the tiles clacked like the marbles he and Bucky used to play with as kids. Each one was imprinted with a letter, or sometimes a symbol—a tear drop, an arrow, a bouquet of flowers, a stick figure—the outline of a swing set. Some hodgepodge of answers people had decided, once, they wanted to see.

He’d made a choice. He couldn’t back down now.

“If anyone’s here, give me a name,” Steve said, upending the bag onto the tableau he’d created. 

(Until that moment, he’d pretended so well that he’d fooled himself. He didn’t want answers. He wanted _an_ answer, a way to set a name to his longing. Steve had no interest in any lost soul that didn’t belong to Bucky. He’d wrapped himself in Bucky’s jacket as if it might call him home where Steve couldn’t, as a talisman against inevitable disappointment.)

The tiles clattered to the floor. Most of them were haphazard.

In the middle of that mess were two discernable words.

SORY STVVE

Steve covered his face. The grief came on as strong as the first day—it had a chokehold he’d pretended he wasn’t suffocating in—but he was, he was suffocating. It trapped a scream in his heart that only kept swelling and growing rancid. It burst out briefly: an aborted sob. He rocked on his knees once, hard.

Then he wiped his eyes, took a shuddery breath, and swept the dirtied tiles back into the bag. He jotted down the first response in the notebook, dutifully, although he couldn’t ever forget it if he tried. Although he surveyed the living area, it seemed to hold no secrets. The flicker of the firelight on the walls was the only moving thing.

“Bucky?” Steve asked. “Is that you?”

And he upended the bag again.

YES

 

**xxvix.**

 

_This is insane. This isn’t possible,_ thought Steve. He recorded the response and gathered the tiles up again. The ash was getting under his fingernails.

“Where are you right now?” he asked, but received no discernable response when he threw the tiles. Neither did he when he asked, “Do you know what happened to you?”

The candlelight shivered. Steve pressed the bag to his chin and thought carefully. He asked his next question with intention instead of blind desperation. A simple yes/no. “Bucky, have you been here the whole time?” 

The tiles hit in a clatter. Carefully, Steve ran his hand over them until a word jumped out.

SLEPING

“Me too,” said Steve. It didn’t have to make sense to be true.

The shadows didn’t hold anything for him—no figure, no impression of movement—but Steve regarded them, anyway. It was as good a place to talk to as any. “You’ve scared the hell out of me, Buck,” he told them. “I thought I was—jeez, I don’t know, maybe I’m still losing it. The magnets, that was you? The doors?”

He spilled the tiles again, but there weren’t any words he could make out reliably. The symbols were hard. A few fell farther from the others—a simple outline of a house and a stick figure—and maybe there was something there. Maybe not.

Gathering the tiles up, Steve tried again. “Have you been trying to reach me?”

CARFUL STVE

“You don’t get to say that,” Steve said before he could help himself. “You—you died, Buck. I’ve _been_ careful. I’ve been trying, every day.” He broke off, taking deep breaths. “I’ve been trying,” he said again, when he could.

He didn’t have a question this time, but he got an answer.

SORRY

Steve scooped up the tiles and let them fall. He didn’t need to know anything; he just needed to know Bucky was _there_.

SRRY

Again.

SORRY

Again.

IM SORR

The F line crossed overhead on its tracks, shaking the ill-fit window panes in their frames. Steve realized he was crying, and then he was laughing, and then he was filled with a sick cocktail of numbing loss and vicious triumph. 

Bucky wasn’t gone. He’d come home after all.

 

**xxx.**

 

By the end of the session, the notebook page was full of aborted responses, scattered between questionable ones that Steve wasn’t certain were responses at all. It wasn’t an exact science; there was an entire half hour where Steve received no response at all, and he wondered if the energy it took to manipulate the tiles had depleted. When the responses trailed again, he reluctantly packed up shop for the night.

Then he slept for almost an entire day, and woke up to find the living room closet door open and the water running in the bath.

Steve shut off the water. He closed the closet door. He thought about what it might mean, or what it didn’t. Then, after making a pot of coffee strong enough to strip paint, he settled on the sofa and reviewed the notebook again. In the light of day, the words seemed like something juvenile and dream-like. But he wouldn’t backtrack now. He was resolved. He’d found a way forward, and though he couldn’t get much farther on his own, he wasn’t alone.

“We’re going to fix this,” Steve told Bucky. “Or as near as we can get to it, we will. We’ve made contact. That was step one. We can do better. I won’t leave you in some kind of… between place, Buck, I can’t.”

The apartment wasn’t empty. Now that he knew, it felt obvious—there was a presence in the atoms, in the air. Even in the light of day, Steve had a sense of being watched and aggrieved for. 

Steve went to the refrigerator. He removed the Mets magnet affixing Bruce Banner’s business card to its surface.


End file.
